Philosophers frequently ask big questions about the pursuit of happiness. Social scientists are concerned about the decline of happiness. In the video below, Arthur Brooks talks about the science of happiness, components of happiness, and the four key habits of happy people.
The text below is derived from the video transcript. Professor Brooks speech about the pursuit of happiness has been edited for brevity and clarity while preserving the original message and structure.
Pursuit of Happiness: The Science of Happiness
Happiness, that’s what I teach at Harvard University. I’m a behavioral scientist dedicated to the neuroscience and social science around happiness. It seems like a weird subject to teach at a business school, perhaps, but it really isn’t. I teach the business of life. You are all entrepreneurs in the sacred enterprise of your own life. You’re the founder, you’re the CEO, but you have to know the currency of the fortune that you’re trying to accumulate. It’s not money or power or pleasure or fame or admiration. No, it’s love and happiness. Do you know how to accumulate that? Do you know how to bring that to others? Well, that’s what I teach. As a matter of fact, I’ll be teaching that tomorrow morning in the classroom at the Harvard Business School, and I want to tell you what I’m teaching them in the next 13 minutes and 50 seconds. I’m going to give you the entire semester — well, not really, but I’m going to start with the biggest mistake that people make about happiness in this world today.
Pursuit of Happiness: What is Happiness?
People think happiness is a feeling. It’s not. The feeling of happiness is like the smell of your dinner — it’s evidence of dinner. Happiness is something you can actually understand, change your habits for, and get more of if you know what it is.
Three Components of Happiness
Happiness is a combination of three macronutrients: (1) enjoyment, (2) satisfaction, and (3) meaning.
When you know how to get more of those, you can have a better life, and you can fight for those things in our society, our culture, and our public policy to bring it to a world that needs it so much. So let me tell you how to do that in just a few brief words. There are a lot of misconceptions about these things. The mistake people make is thinking that enjoyment is the same thing as pleasure. It’s not. Pleasure is an animal thing. Enjoyment adds people and memory to make it uniquely human. Satisfaction is the joy you get from accomplishing something hard with struggle — only humans want that. Finally, there’s meaning: the idea of the coherence of your life, the purpose with goals, the significance that your life matters.
Wonderful research actually looks at identical twins separated at birth and adopted into separate families. This is not a diabolical Harvard study — it just happened naturally. When we reunite these people at the age of 40 and give them personality tests and tests about all different parts of their lives, you find that about 50% of their difference in happiness is genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy. This is important to understand because what this means is not that happiness is out of your control. On the contrary, the same studies show that 50% of your tendency to abuse alcohol is also genetic. But if you came to me and said, “My parents drank too much, and my grandparents too, so I guess I’m going to be an alcoholic,” I’d say, “Oh, you missed a step.” Because you know this, you can turn that genetic proclivity to zero by not drinking. That means habits are important if you know yourself.
So, the first 50% of your tendency toward happiness is genetic. The next 25% is circumstantial — the good things and bad things in your life. My students think that’s everything: if I can just get better circumstances — the job, the money, the position, the family, whatever it happens to be — great. But that’s transient, that’s evanescent. It turns out that in any given moment, nice circumstances will drive your happiness up by 25%, or down by 25% if you’re experiencing unfortunate circumstances, but it doesn’t last. What you need are good habits that will give you systematically better circumstances, and that’s the last 25%, which is what I want to talk about with you today.
The Four Key Happiness Habits
These are the things that, if you pay attention to them, cultivate them, and practice them every day, will give you 25% of your happiness under your direct control. They will allow you to improve your circumstances and manage your genetic proclivities. But you have to know what they are. I could give you 10,000 little habits, but they’re trivial. There are only four that really matter. All of the science, all the neuroscience, behavioral science of happiness comes down to these four. Here they are, here’s what you need to put in the accounts every day. This is your happiness pension plan — make a deposit every day in these four accounts: your faith, your family, your friendship, and your work.
Faith: A Transcendent Faith In God
When I say faith, I don’t mean my faith. I’m a Roman Catholic — it’s literally the most important thing in my life. But as a social scientist, I will tell you that my path toward happiness is not necessarily the only path. What you need is not a particular religious path — metaphysically, that’s a different matter entirely. For happiness, what you need is a path that will help you transcend yourself. We’re stuck in the psychodrama of life every day: my job, my commute, my money, my lunch, my television shows — it’s so boring.
What we need is relief and peace and perspective, and the only way to do that is to get small and make the universe large, to cut our narcissism and pay attention to the awe of what’s greater than us. There are lots of ways to do that. Some people like to study the Stoic philosophers, others like to walk in nature without devices for an hour before dawn, study the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, or, like me, practice seriously the faith of your youth. But you need something to get small and not let the narcissistic world take over your soul. That’s faith. (A happy rabbit trail: read my thoughts about finding happiness.)
Family: The Power of Connection
Family life is a mysterious one. I could explain the neuroscience — the hormones and neuropeptides in the brain that tell us who our people are and that our people belong to us — but it’s still like a miracle when you see those people, and it’s like the Fourth of July in America inside your head. How important that really is. There are so many things that are ripping us apart. One in six Americans today is not speaking to a family member because of politics. That’s falling prey to somebody else’s culture war — don’t let it happen to you. There’s one reason to have a schism with your family, and that’s abuse. And newsflash: differences of political opinion are not abuse. They’re an opportunity to understand each other and to live with each other in love. Then, of course, there’s the culture that says marriage and kids are for suckers. No, that’s the fast road to happiness.
Friendship: Real vs. Deal Friends
Friendship — there have been so many forces that have militated against effective friendships in our society. Zoom friendships don’t work. Social media friendships? That’s not real friends. Then, of course, there’s the whole professionalization of friendship. I make a big distinction in my work between real friends and deal friends. You know the difference. Deal friends are the useful people to you. Real friends are the useless people to you. Do you have enough useless people in your life? I don’t mean worthless — I have them too. This is important, and these are relationships.
Work: Earning Success & Serving Others
There’s one more, which is work. Work is so critically important. I’ve studied work in my profession as a social scientist. I was trained as an economist, and I’ve looked at different kinds of jobs. Different kinds of jobs don’t predict happiness. They don’t bring joy, nor do different levels of income or education. No, no, no. There are only two things that predict joy from your work: earning your success and serving others. I don’t care if you’re a bus driver, a politician, or a CEO — you need to earn your success and serve other people. That is the essence of joy from work. Earning your success means that you’re creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people. That means you are being rewarded and acknowledged for merit and hard work and personal responsibility. That is why there is one economic system that brings joy to work, and that’s the free enterprise system. That’s the only one we’ve ever invented.
More importantly, we need to be needed. The essence of dignity is to be needed. The essence of despair is to be managed like a liability, which is why our welfare systems do such a poor job. They treat people at the margins of society like liabilities to manage, as opposed to assets to develop. You need to be needed, and so do I. That means in your work, you need to serve other people and see how you’re helping other people to live better lives. The free enterprise system does that too. I talk about capitalism and free enterprise a lot, not because I’m worried about GDP growth — I am, but that’s not why. It’s because I want more human dignity, because I want more happiness.
The Decline of Happiness in Society
This is the essence of the four values I’m talking about here. It’s not a political agenda at all — it’s an agenda of human flourishing. If you want to be a happier person, these are the accounts in which to put your attention and time and energy and affection every day: your faith, work on it seriously every single day, your family life, your friendships, and your work in which you earn your success. There’s one big concern that animates me, which is not just you leaving this beautiful place and having this great experience and being happier yourself. No, no, no — you’re here because you want to change society, and so do I.
It turns out that when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, we’re almost literally in a world of hurt. The happiness indices are going in the wrong direction in almost every country. In the United States, we’ve seen this secular decline in happiness going back to about 1990, with big dips that have happened, especially since the turn of the century. Why? People pay attention to the weather, as it were — the weather of happiness, the storms of happiness: the coronavirus epidemic, the financial crisis, the onset of social media. Those things are all bad, don’t get me wrong, but we tend to neglect the climate of happiness. That’s a bigger problem that, little by little, is driving down the well-being of people all over the world today. You know what it comes from? The same thing that will ruin your happiness: a lack of the big four.
Look around. What will you see for people under 35 today? A decline in faith. The year I was born in the United States, 1% had no religious affiliation. Today, it’s 34%. People are saying they’re lonelier than they’ve ever been. They’re walking away from marriage, they’re not having children, they don’t have a vocational sense of their work, and they’re turning against the free enterprise system. Those are the stakes.
A Call To Action: Pursuit of Happiness
If we want to be happier people and we want to live in a happier society, those are the things to fight for. Those are the things to stand up for. Don’t let anybody say that you’re fighting for faith, family, community, friendship and the free enterprise system — because it’s all about your politics or the tax rate. No, no, no — this is what the world needs. Pay attention to these things in your life. If you pay attention to these things in your life, here’s what I promise you, the same thing I promise my students, the same things I practice myself: you will get happier for the rest of your life.
Furthermore, if you leave here and work for these institutions — more faith in our society, a greater sense of family values with more marriage and more babies, because babies are awesome, with closer friends, with more coherent communities, with a capitalist system that brings everybody in from the margins for more opportunity, and where we’re dedicated to loving and serving each other — that’s how the world gets better. That is not a political agenda; that’s an agenda for greater world happiness, and we need to be part of it.
Arthur C. Brooks is a Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and the pursuit of happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic where he writes the How to Build a Life column, a public speaker, and the author of 13 books.